I do so not to privilege the position of the literary critic but rather to accomplish two goals--to facilitate a reading of Dorothy Wordsworth as an experimental author writing in the literal and figurative margins of a literary history that she is working to construct, and to open up a conversation about how reading the experimental Dorothy Wordsworth might enrich our understanding of the Romantic inheritance.

The classic voices of Geoffrey Chaucer, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Johnson, Robert Burns, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne are heard beside those of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Donald Hall, and contemporary voices such as those of Annie Dillard and Barbara Kingsolver.

The performers include comedians Nicky (Lucy Punch) and Tommy (Chris O'Dowd), sweet newcomer Faith (Lyndsey Marshall) presenting a hilarious one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth and priest Mike (Clive Russell), with his show about paedophilia.

Among the colourful array of festival 'performers' are Sean Sullivan, (played by Stephen Mangan, star of Channel 4 comedy Green Wing), a hugely obnoxious comic who has hit the big time, Brother Mike (Clive Russell), a Catholic priest who tries to distract himself from his more perverse leanings and Faith Myers (Lyndsey Marshal) who is convinced her one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth will pack in the Edinburgh crowds.

Blue Venus is the newest poetry collection by Lisa Russ Spaar (winner of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women writers and Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing, University of Virginia) and one that continues the theme of insomnia by exploring the sleeplessness of such fascinating personalities as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Merton, the great hypnotist Mesmer, and others.

It contains several inconsistencies, such as, for example, the unexpected appearance of Dorothy Wordsworth in the poem, or the less conspicuous but perhaps even more surprising fact that the speaker in this last section of the poem appears as a man who knows, possesses and teaches the truth, although the previous parts of the text describe a man tortured by doubts and uncertainty.

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